The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)
Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.
Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.
The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)
Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.
Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.